One
of the big educational challenges we’ve had for a very long time—and we have
not done well with it at all—is how to provide a good general education for
students in a vocational course of study. This failure reflects our larger
cultural failures to bridge class divides and divides among subject areas in
the school curriculum. Last year around this time, I posted an essay I wrote
for The Hedgehog Review on the changes occurring in the world of
work—automation, outsourcing, the gig economy—and the effects they could have
on vocational education.
More
than ever, I argued, vocational education will need to provide the necessary
knowledge and frames of mind to enable young people to think carefully and
critically about the work they do and about the social and economic issues that
affect their work and their lives as citizens. To achieve this goal, educators
and policy makers will need to engage in some pretty deep thinking themselves
about the way students in a vocational course of study are typically exposed to
the humanities, social sciences, and science. Deep thinking, uncomfortable
thinking, is also needed about our widely shared assumptions regarding the
intellectual capacity of students who are drawn to vocational education.
I
certainly felt a sense of urgency when I wrote the essay, given the sweeping
transformation of the workplace, but now, under the Trump presidency, I read
the essay in a different light: As advocating an (admittedly modest)
educational hedge against authoritarianism and bamboozlement. A different kind
of urgency.
Under
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, education will likely be defined in the most
functional and economistic of terms—as preparation for the world of work.
Vocational education will be reduced to narrow job training, a limited kind of
education that has, sadly, characterized VocEd at times in its past, but that a
lot of people have been working against over the last few decades. Some in the
vocational education community are hopeful that the Trump administration with
its rhetoric about job creation will be supportive of VocEd, and that may be
so. But you can bet that the VocEd they champion will be of the most
unimaginative variety; not at all the sort of education I call for below.
***
Right at the time when there is on
many fronts a resurgence of interest in vocational education (known these days
as Career and Technical Education or CTE), there is also the proliferation of
prophesies about the impending transformation of work, the wholesale
diminishment of work, and even the end of work. Will there be any vocations
left for vocational education students to enter?
Since the early 1990s, there have
been significant government and privately funded efforts to reform vocational
education, to increase its academic content (more math and literacy instruction
in carpentry or culinary, for example) and to establish more direct pathways
from school to workplace. In line with then-anticipated employment trends,
traditional shop classes in the construction trades, automotive repair, and
machining were cut back and programs in health care, computer and green
technologies, and certain service industries were expanded.
More recently, a diverse range of
commentators – from economists to social critics – have been calling for an
expansion of vocational education, including a return of those old shop
classes, though updated and computerized to match the current labor market.
There are good jobs, economists point out, in mid-level technical occupations
such as specialized manufacturing. Some educators (including but not limited to
CTE interest groups) emphasize the variability of student interests and
aptitudes, not all of which find fulfillment in the typical academic
curriculum. And the dramatic rise of the Makers and Do-It-Yourself movements
has cast a new, more favorable light on vocational education – shouldn’t all
kids have the experience of applying knowledge, making things, tinkering?
Finally, Chambers of Commerce, trade groups, state houses, and even the
president of our country [Obama] have been championing community college
occupational programs for the aforementioned technology-enhanced jobs in
manufacturing, engineering and design, and health care. It’s a promising time
for Career and Technical Education.
Yet on the same opinion page where
you might find a commentary touting the virtues of vocational education, you
might also find a column on the radically different world of work that we are
hurtling toward, even as we read about it… most likely online. At the core of
this brave new workplace is the rapidly evolving processing and problem-solving
capacity of computer technology. Witness over the last half-century the
increased automation of manufacturing and, more recently, the “hollowing out”
of seemingly secure white-collar professional jobs that can be broken down into
component parts and digitized, from bookkeeping to reading medical images. This
increase in computer power and resulting hemorrhaging of jobs will increase
exponentially, the forecasters predict, aided by the post-industrial
reorganization of work, the loss of union power and collective bargaining
protections, and the rise of new industries – like ride-sharing or Airbnb –
that substitute part-time, entrepreneurial labor with no protections or
benefits for traditional jobs like taxi driver, dispatcher, or hotel worker.
These conditions have given rise to a new vocabulary of work – “precarious”
being the key adjective.
There’s no disputing this
transformed world of work; what it will yield a decade or two down the line is
the much-debated question. Whatever scenario plays out will have major
implications for education in general and particularly for Career and Technical
Education. Commentators who lean toward the Utopian see a world where much work
is automated, and most of us are freed to find reward in creative outlets,
civic and social pursuits, caring for others, and the like. Governments will
need to create dramatically new ways to support and remunerate such activities.
Those commentators with a dystopian bent predict a world of mass unemployment,
a scramble for limited, part-time work, widespread aimlessness and depression,
and the threat of profound social unrest. And many commentators land somewhere
in between these extremes and try to envision within a world of precarious
employment ways for people to share jobs; for governments to create vast public
works programs; for physical and virtual business incubators and “makerspaces”
to connect and nurture entrepreneurs and artisans; for significant revisions in
tax codes and financial policy to provide basic needs and income to Americans
without traditional employment.
How do we educate young people for
these possible futures?
To best answer this question, I
think we need first to consider the strain of technological determinism in some
of the writing on the future of work, for that deterministic perspective
affects the way we think about the next generation of Career and Technical
Education.
Though computerization and economic
restructuring are changing the workplace profoundly, the way this change plays
out in the future will be affected not only by continued advances in technology
but also by economic policy, judicial decisions, politics, business and
cultural trends, and social movements. Technology is a powerful force, but it
does not function or evolve in isolation. In fact, the history of technology is
replete with examples of technological innovations that either had a short
lifespan or were never taken up at all. Because something is technologically
possible doesn’t mean that humans will embrace it.
Robots can now perform acts of
dexterity once thought impossible, for example, unscrewing a lid. Achievements
like this lead technology futurists to assume that continued advances will
follow, leading inexorably toward human-level dexterity. Such progress is not
at all assured and over-generalizes from a breakthrough at one level of
engineering to quite another level of sophistication. But for the sake of
argument, let’s imagine that the unlikely happens, and robots can be developed,
let’s say, to cut hair, putting the jobs of three-quarters-of-a-million
American hairstylists at risk. Would the average person want to forego the
touch, judgment, aesthetic sensibility, and free-flowing conversation a human
stylist provides, even if a robot could be programmed to execute a technically
proficient graduated bob?
The history of technology also
demonstrates that while a new technology (the stethoscope or telephone, for example)
can affect, sometimes profoundly, what we can do in and to the world, it
emerges from previous technologies and practices, and its adoption is affected
by them. And while the new technology typically requires new skills to use, it
also draws on existing knowledge and skills, even as it might alter them. In
fact, old-technology knowledge can enhance performance. My friend Mavourneen
Wilcox was, as a young astronomer, quite skilled at the use of adaptive optics,
a revolutionary method of correcting – through an elaborate system of optical
sensors and a segmented, rapidly changing mirror – the atmospheric distortion
of the light from celestial objects. She credits her finesse in manipulating
the instrument to all the time she spent in old-school electronics labs and
machine shops, learning “how to work around things when they don’t go right.”
We certainly want a new Career and Technical Education to be responsive to
changes in the nature and distribution of work, but we also need to be
historically grounded in our assessment of the work that lies ahead.
***
The changes in work we are currently
witnessing have several immediate implications for Career and Technical
Education. A number of educators and policy makers have noted that some level
of computer skill is increasingly necessary for any kind of work, styling hair
to auto mechanics to medical technology. So-called “soft job skills”
(communication, punctuality, flexibility) have been part of the national
discussion about work for decades, and more recently we are hearing a lot about
qualities of character like determination, optimism, and the hot buzzword
“grit.” These skills and qualities would serve someone well in a precarious
economy, the reasoning goes, where resilience, adaptability, and the like
become not just desirable but necessary for survival. So too would training in
entrepreneurship, developing the ability to seize opportunity and promote one’s
talents and resources.
All well and good. But there are
deeper, culturally ingrained issues that I think need to be addressed
regardless of what the future holds: status quo to profound transformation.
These issues have been evident for some time but are difficult to address.
Perhaps the dramatic visions of a new world of work will add some urgency to
address them.
***
The first has to do with the long-standing divide
in the American school curriculum between the “academic” and the “vocational”
course of study, a distinction institutionalized in the early-twentieth-century
high school. The vocational curriculum prepared students for the world of work,
usually blue or pink-collar work, while the academic curriculum emphasized the
arts and sciences and the cultivation of mental life. The separation
contributed to the formation of a caste system within the school – “social
predestination,” in the words of John Dewey. Another significant problem
resulting from the academic-vocational separation is summed up in a historical
analysis from the National Center for Research in Vocational Education: “[V]ocational
teachers emphasized job-specific skills to the almost complete exclusion of
theoretical content. One result was that the intellectual development of
vocational students tended to be limited at a relatively early age.” The report
captures the fundamental paradox of vocational education as it has been
practiced in the United States: its diminishment of the intellectual dimension
of common work and of the people who do it. Over the past three decades, school
reformers have been trying to bridge this curricular divide, mainly by
abolishing the rigid system that tracked students into the academic or the
vocational curriculum. But the designation of a course as “academic” still
calls up intelligence, smarts, big ideas, while the tag “vocational” conjures quite
the opposite.
Related to the academic/vocational
divide in higher education is the “liberal ideal,” the study of the liberal
arts for their own sake, separate from any connection to the world of work,
crafts and trades, and commerce. The ideal has been with us since Plato and
Aristotle; it found full expression in Cardinal Newman’s Victorian-era The Idea of a University; and it figures
in discussions of higher education today as colleges and universities have
grown and transformed, adding many majors outside of the liberal arts. One
current example of this discussion is found in the widely reviewed book by
Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher
Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – and What
We Can Do About It. Hacker and Dreifus rightly criticize higher education
for a host of sins: soaring cost, production of endless esoteric research,
exploitation of adjunct teachers. What is telling is that the model they offer
to get college back on track is pretty much Cardinal Newman’s.
Their assumption is that anything vocational cannot
lead to, in their words, a liberation of imagination and the stretching of
intellect. How telling that in this bold evaluation of the state of higher
education, their solution fits into the well-worn groove of the
academic/vocational divide, denying the intellectual and imaginative
possibilities of any course of study related to work.
Hand in glove with this gross
division of human activity into the academic and the vocational has been the
social construction of the vocational student as someone who is either not
interested in or not capable of dealing with topics typically defined as
abstract or intellectual. We find this definition at play in early
deliberations about vocational education in the United States. Psychologists
and educators asserted the limited mental capacity of the immigrant and
working-class students for whom Voc Ed was created. As opposed to college-bound
students (overwhelmingly White and middle to upper class) who were “abstract
minded,” working-class and immigrant students were “manually minded” – their
brains functioned differently. The terminology has changed, but there is still
the strong tendency among some policy makers and, sadly, some educators to
assume such cognitive limitation among vocational students. These students
might be skilled, dexterous, hard-working, even resourceful and inventive, but
not good at abstraction or the conceptual, and not interested in history or
psychology or literature.
For some vocational teachers and
programs, these beliefs can translate into a deemphasizing of the conceptual
content of work. And historically these beliefs also have resulted in a bland
curriculum of non-voc-ed school subjects; science or history lite. But students
can dread the history or science textbook and have fits at the threshold of the
classroom, but still be interested in history or science… or a host of other
subjects when they are presented in a way that doesn’t conjure up the
schoolhouse.
Several years ago I was visiting a
humanities course at an occupationally oriented community college, a course
required for the Associate of Arts degree. Most of the students were in the
construction trades. The class was assigned several essays that dealt with
education, sociology, and economics, topics that would seem pertinent to this
group, but the discussion was going nowhere. Most of the students were
disengaged, some were talking with each other, the teacher was treading water.
Fortunately, the teacher had bought in a guest speaker, who took over. He was
in education, but had grown up in the neighborhood of the college and his
forbears had worked in the manufacturing and service industries. He began by
talking about his background, and tied it to some of the topics in the essays.
Then he asked the students to describe their high schools, and he pointed out
connections with the essays. Thus the class proceeded, and the students had a
lot to say about the themes in the readings: about economics and inequality,
about race and social class, about the goals of education.
There are so many moments in
vocational education where values, ethical questions, connections of self to
tradition emerge naturally, and with consequence, ripe for thoughtful
consideration. Surrounding such issues, influencing them at every level of
working life, are the profound effects of social location, economics, politics.
The early architects of VocEd wiped these concerns from the curriculum, and
vocational education has been pretty anemic on such topics since. And overall
we have done a poor job of supplementing vocational education with a thoughtful
and vibrant course of study in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts.
These are the challenges that face the next generation of Career and Technical
Education, and they will demand a deep examination of our cultural biases about
intelligence, areas of study, and the purpose of schooling.
***
The Career and Technical Education
student who is prepared for whatever version of work that evolves will need to
be computer savvy, resourceful, and entrepreneurial. These qualities seem
self-evident and would probably find wide agreement from both educators and
employers. But the predictions about the new world of work suggest other
educational goals as well.
Intellectual suppleness will have to
be as key an element of a future Career and Technical Education as the content
knowledge of a field. The best CTE already helps students develop an inquiring,
problem-solving cast of mind, but to make developing such a cast of mind
standard practice will require, I think, a continual redefining of CTE and an
excavation of the beliefs about work and intelligence that led to the
separation of the “academic” and the “vocational” in the first place. Of
course, students will learn the tools, techniques, and routines of practice of
a particular field. You can’t become proficient without them. But in addition
students will need to learn the conceptual base of those tools and techniques
and how to reason with them, for future work is predicted to be increasingly
fluid and mutable. A standard production process or routine of service could
change dramatically. Would employees be able to understand the principles
involved in the process or routine and adapt past skills to the new workplace?
We also will need to examine our
culturally received assumptions about people who are drawn to any of the
pursuits that fall within CTE, hospitality to nursing to the construction
trades. To borrow a phrase from labor journalist William Serrin, we need “to
give workers back their heads” and assume and encourage the intellectual
engagement of students in the world of work. And if the theorists about the new
world of work are right, then more than ever we need to provide for CTE
students a serious and substantial education in history, sociology and
psychology, economics and political science. What are the forces shaping the
economy? Are there any pressure points for individual or collective action? How
did we get to this place, and are there lessons to be learned from exploring
that history? What resources are out there, what options do I have, how do I
determine their benefits and liabilities? Though a curriculum that would give
rise to questions like these has typically not been part of traditional
vocational education, there is a separate history of worker education programs
that blend politics, social sciences, and humanities with occupational
education, from early-twentieth-century labor colleges to contemporary
institutions like the Van Arsdale Labor Center at Empire State College. We have
models to learn from.
These
reconsiderations will require a philosophy of education that has at its core a
bountiful definition of intelligence and that honors multiple kinds of
knowledge and advances the humanistic, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of an
occupational as well as more traditional academic course of study. We need such
a philosophy now, but we will need it even more in tomorrow’s world of work.
Otherwise, the education of future workers will be cognitively narrow and
politically passive, adding little more to the current curriculum than
additional training in computer skills or techniques of self-promotion. Teach
those things, of course, but also educate young workers so that they have multiple
skills and bodies of knowledge to draw on, so that they are able to analyze and
act upon opportunities to affect the direction of their employment, and so that
they can strive to create meaning in their working lives.
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